


Happy Xmas (War is Over)

by seraphcelene



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Christmas, F/M, Post-Chosen, Post-Episode: s07e22 Chosen, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-31
Updated: 2014-12-31
Packaged: 2018-03-04 11:28:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3066182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphcelene/pseuds/seraphcelene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Against the tide we struggle with the skin we're in." Dawn, after.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Happy Xmas (War is Over)

**Author's Note:**

> The expanded first section of [this is the world, which is round](http://seraphcelene.livejournal.com/159589.html). Very rusty. Haphazard ending. Desperately in need of a beta, but it's been on my hard driver for years and years and I'm tired of picking at it.
> 
> Feedback: Is like air and highly addictive. In other words, yes, please.  
> Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all related characters belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the Warner Company, UPN et al. I’m just taking them out for a little exercise.

The house is quiet, absent of squealing girl voices squabbling over hot water and missing lip gloss. It's been months since Dawn's had to listen to those sorts of full house, lives intersecting sounds. Since Rome it's been just the two of them: Dawn curled tight against Buffy's back beneath the blankets and resisting the creeping edge of daylight. The rest of Dawn is folded into the nooks and crannies of Buffy's body: knees tucked into the bend of Buffy's knees, chest pressed against Buffy's back. Dawn is taller and softer but the fit is snug and comfortably familiar.

Buffy pats Dawn's forearm where it drapes across the crease of her waist.

"Cold,” Dawn sighs, and the whispery sound of her voice is almost lost amidst the tender rustle of bed sheets and the brush of skin against soft cotton.

Buffy rolls over and Dawn shifts with her. 

Dawn presses one knee up between Buffy's thighs until they lay flush. The other leg she straightens slowly, easing it against the length of one of Buffy's, creeping carefully into the icy expanse of sheet at the foot of the bed. Dawn is tucked in close, secured by arms across her shoulder and a leg over her hip.She sighs against Buffy's throat, feels the moist heat of her breath flow back over her lips and settles more comfortably into the hollow their bodies have made in the center of the bed. As close as they are, Dawn wants to be closer, longs to push past the anchor of limbs, the illusion of intimacy. In the front of her brain it's something about warmth and comfort. In that small part of herself that recalls infinity, it might be about wholeness and her dreams of eternity.

Buffy re-distributes the blankets, pulls them up over her shoulder and across Dawn's head, cocoons them in a shroud of cotton and goose down.

"We should get up." Buffy's talking lips scatter kisses across Dawn's forehead.

“Cold,” Dawn says again, shivering at the thought of light and snow and ice. She stretches against Buffy, tightens her arms to squeeze them closer. Gently, she draws languid circles over a patch of skin at Buffy's waist. Buffy sighs, and presses a proper kiss onto Dawn's forehead. Their tangled bodies sink deeper into the mattress.

***

Hovering between dreaming and wakefulness, the feeling that she’s forgotten something very important nags at Dawn as she dozes. Once she was large -- a monolithic supernova -- expansive, infiltrating, vibrating with magic and the truth of how the world began. Reality folded around her, bent like light so that she existed in many worlds all at once. Worshiped on an altar or kept in a box, she doesn’t recall, but she dreams of safety in a garden where she knew the meaning of everything. Then a dragon came to the garden, and there was heat and pain and the agony of being lost or stolen, she isn’t sure which, although the story that Giles had written down, later confirmed by Buffy, would indicate that what happened (whatever it was that happened) was all for the greater good.

As the story goes, she was pressed down into the shape of a girl. They, the ones who kept her and later gifted her, held tight to the glow of her and squeezed until she pulsed with life and secrets that even she wasn’t aware of, her own magic amplified by the blood they mixed in.

Laced through the memories they gave her of bubbling girl voices, Thanksgiving pie and the scent of her mother’s shampoo are memories of an Impressionist garden and dark, secret rooms soundtracked by chanting and lit by the warm, uneasy glow of candles. Dawn dreams that she isn't a girl at all, but something older and stronger, something that doesn't belong in the world walking and talking and cuddling in the dark. Her dreams are big as the universe and Dawn wears stars draped in her hair. Those dreams are more real than her real life at times. More real than the fall of hair against her waist or the smooth, almond shape of her eyes reflected in the mirror, and she wonders which is really the dream: the key that dreamed she was a girl or the girl who dreamed she was a key. Haunted by dreams in which she is all-encompassing night, Dawn finds that she is too much of them all. Her mother would have said that Dawn is a square peg in a round hole.

Sometimes Dawn also thinks that she dreamed those few balmy, liberated months in Italy. Dancing in the piazza's late at night, eating gelato on the Spanish Steps and watching the tourists, having forgotten for a moment that she was still a tourist herself. One afternoon in Rome, Vittorio, with his beautiful chocolate eyes and dark hair, talked her into throwing three coins into the Trevi Fountain. 

"For luck," he said. "It will ensure your return to Roma."

Dawn didn't think there was a charm strong enough to ground her, but she smiled anyway,and pressed a kiss the flavor of Limoncello into the corner of his mouth. Vittorio paused for the cold, icy kiss, savored the sweet tartness on her lips, and offered her three dull coins eagerly dug out of his pocket. He held her free hand and whispered the count into her ear --

_Uno_

_Due_

_Tre_

\-- and she tossed the coins.

Dawn hasn't been back to Italy since.

***

The creep of day is marked by the fall of light around the curtain. They no longer bother with keeping the time and when Dawn finally untangles herself from Buffy it could be mid-morning or early evening. Instead of remaining in bed, dreaming of twilight and a mysterious candle-lit garden, Dawn throws the blanket aside. Gasping at the biting cold, she swings her bare legs over the side of the bed.

If the half-empty Ambient bottle on the nightstand is any indication, Buffy will sleep for awhile longer. Her hyper-slayer metabolism burns through the pills too fast, so she takes handfuls at a time, sleeping like the dead for hours and when she wakes she floats through days with a dreamy far away look in her eyes. Dying and coming back, losing Anya, all the Potentials who were slaughtered over the Hellmouth, and Angel (again) have taken a toll on Buffy. She's washed out, wrung dry, more exhausted than any 24-year old has a right to be.

If Dawn knew she wouldn't dream, or possibly totally overdose, she would swallow the whole damn bottle of sleeping pills herself and give herself over to drowning euphoria, too. But someone has to take care of Buffy. Someone has to manage the waking hours, the groceries, the bills. Dawn is the one who gently nudges Buffy, when she allows it: eat, brush teeth, wash face, shower. Dawn brushes Buffy's hair for her like Joyce used to. Fifty strokes from root to tip.

 _We have got to get more rugs_ , Dawn thinks before dropping her toes to the hard wood and slowly easing the soles of her feet flat against the floor. She looks back and meets Buffy's glassy, heavy-lidded gaze. The blanket has slipped, and in the icy air, the march of gooseflesh has begun the climb across the mountain of Buffy's shoulder. 

"You ruin everything," Buffy says in the brittle, lethargic voice that Dawn has come to hate. 

"It's what I'm good at." Dawn scoops up her robe from where it lays in an abandoned heap at the foot of the bed. She hugs herself into the chilly terry cloth and ties the belt tight around her waist. "Everyone should be good at something."

Rolling away, presenting her back to Dawn, Buffy tugs the blankets up around her shoulders and murmurs, "I love you." Her voice is muffled and indistinct beneath the cotton and down.

***

Dawn pushes open her bedroom window and props herself up with a hip against the snow dusted window sill and lights a cigarette with the flick-click of a silver lighter she keeps tucked in her back pocket. She inhales deeply, sucks the smoke into her lungs and holds the swirl of it in her chest for a moment before exhaling with a sigh.

The room is seldom used and nearly bare. A double bed is pushed up against one wall and a wardrobe stands on the other side of the window. Sometimes Dawn sits inside the wardrobe and dreams of falling through the forest of jeans and hanging coats and disappearing. Sometimes, she almost falls asleep and in the hazy space between sleep and wakefulness, she can almost see how its possible to turn a key and open a door and be somewhere else entirely. But she never follows through, even when she can see the way out. Even when the shape of it is so very obvious.

"Dawn," Buffy calls from downstairs. "Get your ass down here. I want to leave, like, ten minutes ago."

Dawn ignores Buffy's muted voice.

Staring out at the snowy street, the flurry outside the window slows until Dawn is staring through a tapestry of suspended snowflakes at a pair of dark figures on the street below. Dawn isn't surprised. This was always meant to happen. The pattern of it is pressed upon the spill of her blood through her veins, the timing measured in the tattoo of her heart. This will not be the first time her dreams have come true.

"Dawn," Buffy calls again. "Seriously!"

Dawn abandons the window and ignores the scarf and gloves laid out across the bed. She doesn't put out the cigarette, doesn't close the window.

At the bottom of the stairs, Buffy is shrugging into a coat the color of persimmons. She flips her hair, long as it's ever been and dark as the grave, over the collar.

"It's about time," Buffy growls. "You drag me awake at the butt crack of dawn with this whole Christmas shopping thing ... It's freezing." Buffy looks up as Dawn comes down the stairs. Dawn holds the cigarette elegantly between her first two fingers. "God, Dawn! Could you please not smoke in the house."

Dawn pauses two steps from the bottom of the staircase, tucks the cigarette between her lips, inhales and on the exhalation she says, "you'd better get the door."

The sound of the knocker falls unexpected and shattering into the quiet of the house, cutting into Buffy's bitter, distracted tirade. Buffy looks up from her attack on the regiment of shiny gold buttons marching the length of her coat.

A second knock falls jarring and intrusive between them. Dawn shrugs. “Open it."

Buffy's sweet, flexible mouth purses with hesitation and suspicion. Finally, she turns, flips the lock on the door and pulls it open.

Dawn's heart beats slow and measured, unhurried and unsurprised. Six months in L.A. dragging bodies from the rubble, seven years on a Hellmouth caught in the collision of reality and impossibility and they are still unprepared for the stunning shock of miracles and curses.

Buffy throws herself into the arms of the man on the other side of the door.

Dawn watches them from the stairs. "Hey Angel," she says.

 

II.

They're in the kitchen and it's almost like Sunnydale all over again. Like nothing's changed, and she can pretend her mother is in the other room and Buffy's brooding upstairs. Only Joyce is gone, the kitchen is all wrong, and London is infinitely colder than Sunnydale ever was. Still, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and Dawn is exiled in the kitchen with Spike.

"Bloody hell and back again," he had said, held back at the house's threshold. He looked up at Dawn, his eyes blue and clear and hard. "You gonna invite me in, Pigeon, or what?" 

Dawn shifted on the stairs, gaze sliding past Buffy and Angel. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess. Come in.”

Spike stepped across the threshold, glanced back and with a roll of his eyes he tapped Angel on the back of his hand where it rested against Buffy’s head. “You might want to come in out of the weather,” he muttered. “It’s bloody snowing.”

Buffy whispered Angel's name and invited him inside. Buffy led Angel to the living room and Dawn headed for the isolation of the kitchen with Spike on her heels. And now he's perched on the edge of the kitchen counter, watching Dawn fill an electric tea kettle with water. Packets of instant hot chocolate mix and mini marshmallows lie on the counter near his hip. 

"So, you're a chatty wonder over there." He snags a marshmallow from the bag beside him and tosses it at Dawn, misses her completely and ignores the annoyed under-the-eyelashes look she shoots his way. "I see London's grown on you. Heating water in a proper kettle and all."

"Yeah, well. We've been here for a while." Dawn leans a hip against the butcher block in the center of the room, folds her arms over her chest, and stares at Spike non-nonchalantly draped across the sink. She thinks about the weeks and months of searching. "What about you? What happened to you," she asks. "We looked for Angel ... everywhere ... for months. We never thought to look for you. I mean, not after you went all Roman candle in Sunnydale. But where were you two?"

Spike shrugs. Same negligent roll of the shoulders as always and she wants to shake him, hit him, bite him. 

"You know," he drawls. "End of the world, blah blah blah ... went to hell, blah blah blah ... came back." He tilts his chin up at Dawn and tosses another marshmallow at her, this one bounces off her forehead before falling to the ground.

***

Dawn tells Spike about a new watcher and her small legion of local slayers crowing about the sky falling and Hell smashing its way through L.A.'s asphalt foundation. How she and Buffy left Rome and flew to San Diego where they picked up a rental car because the FAA was no longer clearing flights for landing at LAX; something about dragons in the sky. Then there were the road blocks, national guard, a steady stream of refugees out of Los Angeles, and the eggplant color of the sky.

They abandoned the car and hiked across the empty 405 freeway, down the 110 into Downtown. The edges of the horizon line glared feverishly red and divided the heavens sharply from the Earth. There was smoke everywhere and buildings like broken, jagged teeth punctuated the unnatural sky. The heat was unbearable.

"We stayed for months. Mostly dragging bodies out. Tried to help restore order." Dawn stares blindly at the kettle starting to bubble on the counter. "Faith came. And then she left. And then she came back and then she left again. I think ... I think." Her voice dies out as she stares at the bubbling kettle. "There was just so much dust," she says, finally. "So much ash." 

Every night Buffy had pulled her t-shirt over her head as Dawn watched from the bed, mostly a pallet of blankets and sleeping bags, they shared in the largest refugee camp northwest of the city.

One day Dawn had finally asked her sister: "What if he’s dead?" 

Exhausted, Buffy said, "I'd know if he were dead."

"But what if you’re wrong?" Dawn, tired, finally, of digging through the rubble and following at Buffy's heels, asked "what if you don’t know?" and then something new, unexpected and sharp between them. "Mom was dead for hours."

Buffy froze, her wrists handcuffed in her shirt, hair tangled and matted with drying viscera. She stared at Dawn, her eyes huge and glowing through the tears.

Dawn sat up in bed, one hand outstretched as if she could pluck the words from the air and take them back. "Buffy."

"You're right." Buffy tugged the grimy t-shirt back over her head. "I didn't know. I don't know," she choked. "Um, I-I'm going ... I think I'll go back out. Patrol one more time." 

Buffy stumbled back out into the night, and the next morning they left. They headed North, as far away from the heat and the ash and that *sky* as they could get.

***

"We chased storms for months," Dawn says. "Yeti attacks in the Himalayas. Lake monsters in Siberia. So long as it was cold and colorless." She shrugs, unplugs the kettle when the shrill whistle breaks the quiet. "We've been in London for a few months. The house belonged to the Watcher's Council before it went all kablooey. It's better than roaming aimlessly around the planet. And I think it makes Giles feel better that we're in one place."

Dawn doesn't say that Giles doesn't really trust them by themselves, disconcerted by Buffy's unfocused eyes and the vague, Ambient slur of her words.

Dawn dumps the instant hot chocolate mix into two mugs. She carefully tips the heated kettle and its boiling contents into the mugs and then absently stirs until the powder dissolves. She turns, a thin wan smile stretched across her mouth and scoops up a handful of tiny marshmallows. Dawn dumps them into the mugs. Handing one of the mugs to Spike, she says, "just like Mom used to make," and salutes him with her own mug. "Merry Christmas."

"Right," Spike mutters. "Happy Christmas."

 

iii.

They meet in the upstairs hallway, a long, cold, barren no-man's land between Dawn's room and Buffy's. Buffy, Angel's fingers laced with hers, is standing at the threshold to her bedroom when she looks back, looks over, and there is Dawn fresh from the shower, her hair wet and slicked back from her forehead. Buffy blinks at her, blinks the stardust from her eyes, maybe, and glances back at Angel. She doesn't let him go when she turns.

"Dawnie." And Buffy's eyes are soft, not limp, chemical Ambient dreaminess, but serene and drowsy with happiness. "Angel ..."

"Of course. Whatever. It's okay." Dawn's smile stretches brittle and thin across her face. She smoothes a hand over her wet hair. "You wanna ..." Dawn can feel her cheeks heat, as embarrassed by the idea of her sister sleeping with Angel in the bed they've shared as she is by the fact that she didn't think of it sooner. That she's standing in the icy hall in her bathrobe like some kind of idiot. "I get it," she says. "I just ... habit. Sharing the room, it's just habit."

"Dawn ..." Buffy starts, her voice faltering.

"Dawn." Angel steps forward, one hand raised as if to touch her. Like he knows her. Like he knows anything about her. Like she isn't anything more than a dream the monks gave form long after he left Sunnydale. Angel doesn't know her. She wasn't a person when he lived in Sunnydale.

And sometimes that makes it worse because Dawn remembers it all. Everything. She remembers as if she were there, as if the memories were really hers.Only sometimes the sums don't total and what Dawn feels, the things that she remembers, total more than they should. Sometimes it's like looking through Buffy's eyes. Where Dawn ends and Buffy begins blurs and then she is lost.

Dawn takes a step back, out of Angel's reach. "Really," she says. "It's fine. Good night. Sleep tight, don't let the bed bugs bite." Spitting the words, parroting the words and Tara's ghost is suddenly alive and well beside her. The awkward longing, the disappointment, the feeling of not belonging. Dawn turns away before either of them can offer half-hearted apologies for being happy that Angel is not dead.

***

Across the hall and two doors down, Dawn enters the room she claimed for herself but never really uses. She pulls the door almost closed. In the tiny crack that remains, she peers out and watches Angel and Buffy stand in the hall. Buffy looks unsure, her brow furrowed and then Angel tugs at her hand, at her fingers laced with his. When Buffy looks back at him, she smiles.

Buffy leads Angel into the bedroom and softly closes the door. Dawn isn't sure how long she stands there staring at that closed door, but suddenly Spike is standing on the landing at the top of the stairs outside of Buffy's door. 

"There's an empty room down the hall," she whispers. "Or one upstairs." She presses her door closed with a click

***

Dawn dreams the world's end. Blood on her toes and the sunrise ripping reality at the seams. Dressed for sacrifice in velvet and lace, she waits for Buffy to save her like a fucking maiden in a tower. Buffy, ever the white knight, white hat, HERO, jumps on Dawn's behalf, a starfish of arms and legs as she plummets into the supernova light of Hell and sunrise.

The gut-dropping sensation of falling startles Dawn awake. She gasps, strangled by sorrow and the sound of her scream dying in her throat. She flings her arms out automatically, desperate fingers searching and finding only the cold expanse on the opposite side of the bed. She starts, confused. Red curtains on the windows instead of blue, the wardrobe looming in the shadows. And then she remembers she's been banished to her own bedroom.

Staring up at the ceiling, Dawn recalls the window laced with frost and the figures dark against the snow. It was never going to last, the cocoon that she and Buffy had built in the house, isolated from the world, hibernating and pretzeled together for warmth. Someone was always going to find them. It was always only a matter of time. 

The dream, the nightmare, is still too close, too just beneath the surface and sweat dews on Dawn's skin. Unwinding the sheets tangled around her legs, she steps out of the bed, shivering in the cold air and shrugs into her robe.

The house is quiet, dark and still when she opens her bedroom door. Dawn thinks about going downstairs and heating up some milk, or maybe making a cup of tea. Before she reaches the stairs she hears a groan. Pausing at Buffy's door, Dawn leans in, and the soft, rhythmic creaking makes her heart catch and her stomach flip.

The early morning quiet is broken by the breathy moans and sighs issuing from the other side of the door. Dawn leans her head against the wall and listens. Her breath catches as the creaking intensifies and Buffy's voice breaks higher and louder. Sliding down to the floor, Dawn curls close to the door, one hand pressed to the wood.

***

That's how Spike finds her, infinitely alone, leaning against the wall outside the room she used to share with Buffy and that Buffy now shares with Angel. Dawn sits on the floor, knees spread, her hand vanished down the front of her pajama bottoms. She turns her head when she hears him, but doesn't stop the frantic motion of her fingers between her spread thighs. Buffy's moans float gently through the door.

Spike doesn't look away, stands there at the top of the stairs with one hand on the banister and watches Dawn fuck herself to the music of her sister's moans. The sound of the creaking bed grows louder, less rhythmic. Dawn's hand moves faster, her neck arching, head pressed against the wall, face ever more flushed. She stares at him until she can't ... until she gasps and her knees fall further apart, her body jerking to the sound of Buffy's orgasm.

She doesn't notice when Spike finally moves. Doesn't resist as he scoops her up, broken and discarded, from the floor. Dawn slides her arms around his neck and settles her head on his shoulder. 

Spike doesn't take her to her bedroom down the hall, but up to the room he has claimed at the top of the house. He places her limp, spent body onto his unmade bed and watches as she rolls away from him and curls into herself.

"Don't look at me," she says thickly.

He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply. "A little late for that, pet. Don't you think."

Dawn rolls over and stares balefully. There are tear tracks marring her rosy cheeks. She sits up, eyelashes spiky with her tears, and extends her hand. Spike hands over the cigarette and watches as she takes a drag, her back arched, hair cascading and dark. She pouts around the cigarette, her lips exactly where his have just been. Spike slides his hand up over the delicate bones of Dawn's wrist and brings the cigarette to his mouth. Dawn stares as he inhales and then takes the cigarette and grinds the burning tip into the ashtray beside the bed.

Dawn waits. Spike doesn't tell her that he loves her or that he's wanted her all along. He doesn't say that he will die without her or that she's beautiful or special or kind or brave or any of the things that Dawn imagines Angel tells Buffy. Spike doesn't speak at all.

He turns towards her, slides the front of his body along the side of hers so that she can feel the rise of him beneath his jeans. When he kisses her, it's like the end of the world. His mouth wide over hers, forcing her to take his tongue, deep strokes across the roof of her mouth. It's carnal and slick and reminds her of Buffy's dreams of Angel. 

She can taste the cigarette they've shared and beneath that, the faint coppery sour taint of blood. 

Spike slides his mouth to Dawn's throat, his hand slipping into her pajama bottoms. She is slick where he touches her, still wet with her orgasm. Dawn arches at the contact, mindlessly presses her hips against his hand.

Dawn presses forward, suckles Spikes' tongue as she pushes his hand away and turns towards him more fully. Her hands are on his belt buckle and then the fly of his jeans. Spike catches her hands, stares up at her, pausing as if there is something he needs to say. As if there are words that will make things easier for her. He stares at her hard, at the glimmer of tears and the way that her chest rises and falls and jerks with her uneven breath.

"I can smell you," Spike finally says as he stares into Dawn's eyes. "I can smell how you want this." He jerks his chin at the door. "How you want her. Maybe Angel, too."

"Does it matter?" Dawn asks. "You're here, right now, and I am her. She is me." Dawn squeezes her eyes closed, a tear slides free down her cheek. "They made me out of her and you love her, too." Her voice breaks. "I know you do."

Spike says her name. Calls her Dawn, a fulsome whisper of things unsaid.

Dawn opens her eyes and pushes Spike's hands away. She frees his cock from his jeans and then pushes him onto his back. Leaning down, she gently licks the length of him so that his back arches off the bed and his hands tangle in her hair. Then Dawn settles down and slides her mouth around his cock until it touches the back of her throat.

Spike moans her name. Her heart trips a little harder at the sound because even though sometimes she believes it, it is not the same as saying Buffy. It feels important. Like being herself and being remembered. It's the way that Buffy jumped from a tower for her. For Dawn. For the girl who was a key, but also just a girl.

Dawn's never fucked a vampire. It's one of the few things that she hasn't tried. His coolness is odd, although she can feel the warmth of someone else's blood just below the skin. When she lightly grazes the vein beneath his penis with her teeth, Spike jerks. 

"Careful, pet," he growls

She releases him and turns away, her back to him as she pushes her pajamas down to her knees.

"Dawn," Spike says as he reaches for her.

"Hurry," she gasps and Spike can see her fingers already working between her legs.

"Have it your way, love." And he pulls her back into the cradle of his hard body. Reaches to push her pajamas the rest of the way down, but she stops him.

"No," she says. "Just do it. Do it now."

Spike makes a sound deep in his throat, a growl somewhere between lust and anger. She won't let him be gentle, won't let him be easy. He spreads Dawn's thighs apart as far as the material bunched at her knees will allow. The angle is awkward, with her back flush to his chest. He pulls her hips further back and thrusts upwards. Dawn whimpers as he pushes forward. Her thighs so close together make his entry difficult, tight. 

He pushes in and pulls out, drags his cock across the front wall of her cunt. Spike fucks her shallow. A curious blend of tickling pressure builds. Pressure that feels so good she presses her hips into it, craves more and more until it rides the bladed line of too much. Until she arches her back into it at the same time as she tries to pull forward, to slow the rhythm. 

Spike curls his hand beneath Dawn's jaw just above her throat. He holds her head titled back, the curve in her spine deep as he pounds forward. He holds her in place to take him. And Dawn wants more. Wants whatever lies on the other side of the pleasure that is building low in her belly. Spike catches her clit between the first two fingers of one hand, like holding a cigarette, and squeezes. Dawn feels herself melt away, dissolving into the heavy coil of blind pleasure. Spread thin until she is nothing, until she comes screaming into the bed sheets. 

When Dawn comes, she smells like Buffy.

***

They make a game of it. Spike fucks Dawn wherever he finds her. One morning in the shower, burning through the hot water. Once in the pantry, pressed high against a shelf and Spike cuddled around her back and buried deep. On the stairwell Spike presses Dawn against the wall, her legs hooked over his arms. Buffy and Angel are downstairs in the kitchen making dinner.

"Dawn! Dinner," Buffy calls just as Dawn comes, her moans muffled and swallowed by Spike's mouth.

When she can speak, Dawn sings out, "coming."

Spike barks a laugh. "You certainly did."

"Bring Spike with you," Buffy calls back up. 

Struggling not to laugh, Spike pulls free from Dawn with a flinch. He bends close and kisses her. Dawn punches him in the shoulder and then straightens her clothes.

"He'll be able to smell us. This," Spike says as he tucks himself back into his jeans. "Angel, I mean."

Dawn pauses. "You don't think they know?"

"Trust me. If Saint Angel the all-mighty knew, let alone Buffy do-no-wrong..." he snorts. "I'll be lucky to get through this with my head still attached to my shoulders."

Dawn starts to turn away, weighing the pluses and minuses of losing this particular secret. "Maybe I should take a shower first. Tell Buffy ..."

Spike grabs her by the wrist. 

"Spike." Dawn tries to tug herself free.

"Lucky for you, I like you and I'm willing to take the beating."

Spike pulls Dawn close and kisses her. He slides his tongue across her teeth, massages the roof of her mouth and nips lightly at her bottom lip. Dawn finds herself clinging to him, pushing into the caress, her arms around his neck.

Pulling away, Spike whispers against her parted lips, "Shower or not, pet, it's up to you."

Dawn backs away, her hand to her throat. "Tell Buffy I'll be down in a minute," she says, "I-I have to take a shower."

 

iv.

Giles arrived after Thanksgiving. Two weeks after Spike and Angel. He wanted to see for himself, he said. Came to check on them even though Buffy told him to stay away, he wasn't needed and they were fine. Angel told him nothing. Not where he and Spike had been or what happened after L.A. Spike extended two v'd fingers and declared he was going for a walk.

***

Walks in the snow. Weather to think in, quiet and all undisturbed white. The city is buried in it. It's rare, but this year is colder than usual. Dawn wonders if she is the reason. If this is her wish come true. It's possible. She isn't a real girl, after all.

Dawn pushes open the door quietly, takes off her coat, and hangs it in the hall closet with her scarf and hat. As she pulls her gloves off, she freezes at the sound of music floating through the house. Her mother's favorite Christmas song . Judy Garland crooning about having a merry little Christmas and Dawn remembers watching a movie curled up with her head in her mother's lap and her mother's fingers absently stroking through her hair. She remembers snow and candlelight, Judy Garland with her sad, dream-dark eyes and Margaret O'Brien, snotty and crying. 

Dawn follows the song to the living room. The parlor, as Giles keeps calling it. Memories ghost the now and for a moment she expects to see her mother curled into the corner of the couch watching _Meet Me in St. Louis_. 

The lights in the room are dim and the sparkle from the tree softly lights the room. Buffy and Angel stand in the center of the room. They sway slowly back and forth, Buffy cuddled close against Angel's chest. The slightest smile curves her lips upward. They are magical. Through death and the end of the world they have managed to find each other. 

Dawn stands in the archway, watches them dancing, oblivious to her, to Spike, to Giles who had arrived a week earlier.Something between then and hell and now has changed. Dawn can feel the shift. She can feel the way the world is different. And now Angel is here and Angel fills up every corner of the house. Destines interlocked, there's no room left for anyone else.

A sob wells in Dawn's throat. She slaps her hand over her mouth to hold it in and wonders if Angel can hear her heartbeat or smell the salt in her tears. She wonders of he even cares to try. The truth is that he probably doesn't notice anything beyond the softness of Buffy pressed into his chest, her legs along his, her ear pressed over his heart. Dawn watches Angel rest his cheek on the top of Buffy's head and the way his whole body relaxes into hers.

***

"Xander and Willow should arrive on the 23rd. I haven't heard from Faith, but you never know when she's likely to pop up."

Giles has made plans for them, tied them to London and the house with the promise of Xander and Willow, with cheery Christmas lights on strings of green wire draped around the room. Everything is white, the tiny fairy lights for the tree and the banister, the ornaments, even Gabriel's tiny golden horn has a tiny white ribbon tied around it. Nothing is red or blue or purple, nothing that could remind them of blood or bruises or the colors at the edge of the sky over Los Angeles.

Dawn wants to tell Giles that they are not as fragile as they were. She wants to say that Buffy has woken up. No more Ambient nightmares and zombie days. But the truth is that Angel still feels like a dream (or nightmare) and Dawn is lost in the wake of what he and Buffy are to each other. 

"There's a Yule celebration in the North. I won't stay for the whole thing. I'll be back before Christmas. I'll just pay my respects to the coven. They helped find you before, after all." Something accusing in his voice, a kernel of disapproval and hurt that they had disappeared without a word to anyone, and the ever present fear that they will do it again.

"You don't have to," Buffy says absently, untangling wire and glass bulbs. "Angel and Spike are staying for Christmas. We'll be here."

Huddled in front of the crack and flare of a fire, Dawn runs her hands swiftly over her arms and day dreams about nesting in the blankets on the upstairs bed, cuddled back to belly with Buffy. "God, why is it so damned cold," she bites out.

Buffy never looks up. "We've been in colder climates," she says. 

"Yeah, but that was always in the wild somewhere. Somehow, it doesn't seem fair that it should be this cold in a city. We need more than a fireplace and a couple of radiators." 

"We're closer to the Arctic," Giles reminds her.

"I know that," Dawn says like it's obvious. Clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth, irritated. "I'm, like, research girl. And it still doesn't seem fair." 

"Just think of how much fun it will be to have a white Christmas." Buffy plugs the lights in one string at a time. She pulls the string through her hand slowly, studies the tiny bulbs, checking for any that might have burned out. "Like that one time when Mom and Dad took us to Big Bear. Remember how much fun we had?" Her voice is distracted. It doesn't remind Dawn of all the snow people they had made or of sledding down a nearby hill in the breaks between snowfall. Buffy's voice holds no trace of the lazily fanned snow angels or the snowball fights, the two of them against Hank and Joyce. "I think you were six." 

Dawn tucks her chin into the thick, heavy cowl of her turtleneck sweater. "I was never six. Anyway, I've had enough snow to last me, like, forever," she says. "Fuck a white Christmas." 

"Dawn, really." Giles, stacking boxes of frosted white ornaments in the corner tilts his head back in tired exasperation. His jaw clenches and he closes his eyes for just a moment before going back to stacking the boxes. 

Buffy's head snaps up. "Dawn!"

***

"You want to talk about it?"

Spike comes into the garden and lounges in the doorway. His lip is split and bleeding.

"What happened you?" Dawn asks.

"And that's exactly not what I wanted to talk about. You're all on edge, poppet, and no one can seem to say the right thing to you."

"There's nothing to say."

Spike is behind her suddenly, and he curls an arm around her waist, pulls her close. "I'm here. I know you think it's because of Buffy, but you're wrong. It's you."

Dawn leans back, rests gently against Spike. "Thanks for that," she says. Smiles gently. "Even if you don't really mean it."

"I do mean it and you need to get over this whole key business. You're a real girl. A person. Dawn Summers."

"Yes," Dawn says without smiling. "I am a real girl."

Dawn doesn't say that when she dreams, she dreams of being formless, as big as the universe, but that sometimes she is trapped in skin that is too small. That jealousy poisons her dreams and how not all of her dreams are her own, but that sometimes she dreams Buffy's dreams, too. How's she's always dreamed Buffy's dreams.

Spike holds her tighter, presses his cheek to the top of her head and Dawn realizes that this is what her dreams of Angel are like. This is what Buffy's dreams of Angel are like.

When Buffy dreams of Angel, she dreams of contentment and heartache and the end of the world. It's a tangle of emotions, pulling her in too many directions all at once.

 

V.

For Christmas, Xander came from Africa. He's full of tales about villages and cities and all the other countries he's been to. All of the slayers he's found. 

"They're all so really different. I mean, I guess, you kind of get used to a Buffy model of slayer and then you realize that not all slayers are the way that she is. Even with all the Potentials we had in Sunnydale. The were still just Potentials and not Slayers, you know. Faith totally not counting because she was way with the crazy." Xander glances over at Faith who showed up hours earlier on a flight from Las Vegas. "No offense, you _were_ a little crazy back there in the day."

Faith grins. "None taken." Faith is quiet, so much more solemn than anyone is accustomed to and no one really wants to ask why.

***

Willow comes alone, without Kennedy who she left somewhere in South America training a contingent of baby slayers.

"They need growing up and looking after and this Christmas felt like it should just be us, you know?" Willow hugs Dawn, strokes her hair. "Without Tara and Anya and then with Angel gone. It just felt like it should be us. Of course, I get here, and Angel is all not-dusted and Spike's here, too, all in one piece and who totally saw that one coming?"

Willow hugs Dawn a little tighter, whispers in her ear. "I see you. You're not just a part of Buffy."

And Dawn wonders how she knows. If she can smell the trauma on her skin. Dawn turns into the embrace and hugs Willow back, tucks her face into the curve of Willow's neck and inhales deep. Willow smells like citrus, cardamom, and magic. It's comforting and familiar.

"Oh," Willow says pulling away. "And I totally saw you and Spike getting all frisky with the monkey shines in the kitchen. Might wanna be a little more careful about that."

Dawn smiles and turns bright red. Dawn remembers Spike pinning her to the counter and kissing her. He's becoming less and less careful, walking freely into her room at night, closing the door like he belongs there. He said because he didn't need a room to himself and with so many people visiting, the attic room could be given over. He didn't mention the fight he had with Angel in the back garden or Buffy shoving him into the wall in one of the lower rooms. 

"I love her," she remembered that he said. "Someone has to. Someone will. You know me," he told Buffy and there was something in his eyes, in the tone of his voice and Buffy pulled away without a lot of fight.

"Don't hurt her, Spike." And then Buffy walked away. Looked in his eyes and walked away like that was the only answer she ever needed. As if she didn't need to know anything else.

But of course it made sense and Dawn brushed away how annoyed it made her feel. Buffy had been here first, too, even if Dawn had loved Spike before Buffy understood what they had between them. Dawn thought about how she and her sister were different, but the same person at the same time. She thought about how they both could love Spike and how Buffy loves Angel, but how Dawn loves him, too.

***

No one says anything when Spike pulls Dawn into his lap in front of the fire, not even Xander. When it gets late and quiets, they all sit around as Willow makes tea and hot chocolate.

Spike kisses Dawn on the forehead and then on the lips. "Merry Christmas, Dawn," he whispers.

This is not an answer, but then Dawn isn't sure that she really understands what the question is. With only Buffy in the house, Dawn loses her way. Forgets what her face looks like. Buffy who drowns out the noise with sleeping pills and heavy blankets. But then there was Angel and then Spike, and now a house full of other people: Willow, Xander, Giles, Faith. Dawn sees herself reflected in other eyes and she remembers that she is a person, too.

Dawn still dreams of the key. She dreams of an Impressionist garden lit with the warm, uneasy glow of candles. She also dreams of warmth and Spike curled around her back. She wonders if it matters that she is only partially real. That somewhere she is a key pretending to be a girl. If she can hold these parts of herself together, maybe it won't matter at all.


End file.
